The Restart Project Podcast

We talked this week with Monique Szpak and Halima Koundi, software developers and tinkerers who led our "Build Your Own PC" women's skillshare last week. They recounted how a group of women who were scared to reach inside a PC tower became emboldened PC builders by the end of the second skillshare session. Building a PC is a great way of demystifying computing and empowering users of computers to...

Restarters Ben and Faraz had a busy week, starting with a session inspiring UCL engineering students taking a cours on "How to change the world", and ending with their participation in the mini Maker Faire run by the Institute of Imagination. Parents and children attending the Maker Faire were happy to find out about Restart's work during the event. While only mechanical faults were repaired durin...

How hard could one screen repair be? When Ugo dropped his (unprotected!) Sony Experia mobile in April, little did he know, he was about to find out... After being turned away by one of our favourite professional repair outfits here in London, and upon hearing from Restart trustee about her epic wait for a Sony repair, Ugo decided to source a spare screen and attempt the repair with the help of Res...

Our special guest, chef Ian Riley, shared his tips this week on how to select, buy and maintain appliances for the kitchen. Ian has worked in many different environments over the years, from top restaurants, to catering for rock stars and working on yachts to co-founding his own small restaurant in Brixton, Cornercopia. He is a practical, hands-on person, who does not fall for the hype. Perhaps un...

We love the internet, and the emancipatory potential of communications technology, but what we see around us is a physical alienation from the devices that connect us. Our tactile interaction with them is severely constrained to tapping and swiping - we struggle to even change a battery or upgrade storage or memory. In this respect, our Restart Parties are a feast for the senses - we love "screent...

We've depended on hard drives for decades to store our data and files for our operating systems. They are almost synonymous with data storage. But a quiet revolution has been underway for a couple of years, with the growth of the "solid state drive" or SSD. These drives contain no mechanic or spinning parts, which means they are smaller, more durable and faster. Prices have come down significantly...

Restarter Faraz spent three hours helping an Xbox 360 owner deal with the infamous "Red Ring of Death" fault on his game console, and he joined us to talk about the experience. We learned that the overheating game consoles are an iconic fault, that Microsoft execs valued at $1 billion. And it turns out that a whole online economy sprung up to deal with the problem - including repair kits and full-...

Our mission at The Restart Project is encourage people to keep things for longer. But we are realistic. Sometimes the best option to keep a gadget in use for longer is to find it a new owner. Or, instead of buying new, to buy somebody else's gadget. You won't hear much about this anywhere. It's funny because in the media, there is the constant push to upgrade, buy new, get new features, but very l...

Why does moving on from a mobile sometimes feel like a break up, or worse, a funeral? We talk with Restart Party goers and with designer Joe Macleod about the end, or what he calls "closure experiences". So much is invested in getting us started with gadgets - the marketing, sales and delivery. Then the "on-boarding" of apps, and our "engagement" with online content. But nearly nothing is invested...

We started by paying our respects to climate scientist Sir David MacKay, who died last week at the age of 48. He was very articulate on the climate impacts of our consumption. This episode focused on the Japanese "decluttering" guru Marie Kondo. Ugo and Restart volunteer Ten both started to read Kondo's global best-seller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and...

Ben Skidmore, long-time Restarter and guitar repairman, joined us to talk about how he fell in love with guitars and learned how to repair them. We talked about how musicians often learn to repair, hack and modify their instruments. We speculated that musicians are creative repairers and modifiers of their instruments because their craft involves creativity. Then we talked about a much-discussed t...

We talked about the pressure on libraries, community centres and pub function rooms. Across London, these places are getting the squeeze, either from local authorities or developers, who are treating them as assets, not public goods. In a rare rant, we reveal that the spaces we need to run our radically open community repair events are under assault. Our events are only sustainable as the venues w...

We talked this week about a company that is often on the tip of our tongues, like it or not. For variety's sake (or perhaps with Mr. Robot as inspiration), we've decided to call this company "Peach". Peach sits on a mountain of off-shore cash, makes compelling but expensive products, and hosts these very produced "events" for media, investors and consumers a couple of times a year. In the latest P...

In this episode, podcaster Dave Pickering talks to Professor Jonathan Chapman (University of Brighton), a designer who has helped many other designers change the way they conceive of quality and good design. Chapman's idea of "emotionally durable design" goes beyond actual physical durability and asks what keeps us attached to things, or alternatively, feel perfectly justified in throwing them awa...

We had the pleasure of interviewing Faraz Sayed, long time Restarter, maker and now music maker with a group called Opto Noise. Through the London Hackspace Sonic Hackers, Faraz connected with Stan Lewry and a handful of people who wanted to make music with lasers, spinning discs and photovoltaic cells. Spurred on by an invite to perform at Music Tech Fest in Sweden, they built a working instrumen...

Our work has been affected by Europe from day one. We are very concerned about the potential effects of a Brexit. If you disagree with us, great. If you need more information, great. Go get it! As we're not experts, we thought we would look for some help to frame things. And instead of some boring white paper, we thought we would start with great material from our favourite green podcast Sustainab...

We interviewed photographer Greg Jones about his charming photography project called "Still Works" to document the abandoned electronics and electricals in his south London neighbourhood. Over the course of a couple of years, Greg showed how his neighbours appeared to have carefully placed VCRs, microwaves, monitors, white goods outside their homes. He wonders whether most people wanted others to...

In this episode, we talk tools - how do we actually get into electrical appliances or miniaturised electronic gadgets, many of which are designed to keep us out? Podcaster Dave Pickering accompanies a couple of repairs at the Abbey Community Centre in Kilburn, including a mobile repair and vacuum repair. To get insight into the bigger picture, Dave interviews repair guru Kyle Wiens, founder of iFi...

We interviewed our friend Fidi, who helped spark a repair revolution in Hackney in her free time, and during the work day is helping change the way we engage with companies and corporations with her job at ShareAction. Fidi is one of the founders of the Hackney Fixers, a collective of activists from Sustainable Hackney and her group Friends of the Earth Hackney and Tower Hamlets. They started runn...

We invited our friend Andrew, founder of Mini-maker Faire Brighton and co-organiser of Maker Assembly, among other things, to talk about the links between makers and fixers. Restarter Dave Lukes joined. Andrew talked about making and making do, how for centuries before, we've perceived our material and physical environment as malleable and changeable. With a new wave of digital making, things may...

We invited our friend Max, from Demand Energy Equality, to talk about their inspiring solar workshops. In these day-long events, beginners with very little technical background learn about how photovoltaic cells work. They get a refresher in circuits and electricity, then they make a functional personal solar charger out of PV off-cuts. It's a way of bringing renewable energy closer to people, rai...

We discussed our incipient collaboration with Amnesty, Global Witness and Wikirate, which are working to rate companies on their sourcing of minerals, and Amnesty's report on abuses in electronics supply chains in the DRC. And we couldn't help but talk about the IKEA executive who caught headlines when he said that in the West, we may have reached "peak stuff" in households.

We talked with long-time Restarter Dave Lukes about a couple of appliance repairs attempted in Brixton, at our first Restart Party of 2016. The success of both hinged on the ability to find spare parts. In the case of a vacuum, this was not possible. In the case of a dehumidifier, we were actually able to find a replacement circuit board. Then we did a sort-of debrief from the Consumer Electronics...

We talked with Restart Party participants - and experts from WRAP, Fairphone and Lovefone - about different models for ownership and finance of gadgets, such as rental and leasing. From a user perspective, the answers are not super easy. And the business models still need to emerge too.

This was our last show for 2015. We had Restarter Ten and our podcaster Dave in the studio, sharing some of their thoughts on the most exciting repairs they witnessed during the year: a team effort to repair a TV capacitor topped the bill for Ten, while Dave shared his memory of the proud and passionate owner of an old radio. Then we discussed the implications of the end of Firefox OS for phones;...